Photo credit: Joy Asico
“This film was inspired by many things,” said actress, playwright Elizabeth Chomko who made her directorial debut in What They Had. “It was inspired by memory. I think it was my way, as a writer and as a Catholic [in] some degree of recovery, of trying to find some order in something that felt chaotic and unfair.” A private screening was held at The National Archives McGowan Theatre in collaboration with The Motion Picture Association of America and The Middleburg Film Festival followed by a Q and A with additional panelists Jay Newton-Small (Moderator) and the film’s producers Ron Yerxa and Albert Berger. You may not know their names, but you know their work: Little Miss Sunshine, Election, Nebraska and the list goes on and on.
Albert Berger, Elizabeth Chomko, Ron Yerxa
What They Had centers on a family in crisis. Bridget (Hilary Swank) returns home to Chicago at her brother’s (Michael Shannon) urging to deal with her ailing mother (Blythe Danner) and her father’s (Robert Forster) reluctance to let go of their life together. After Ruth wanders out one night into a snowstorm without any sense of where she is going or what she is doing, her family is forced to face some hard facts about her failing health. Her daughter Bridget flies back to Chicago from Los Angeles with her daughter Emma. Bridget’s brother Nick, who owns a bar downtown, wants to send his mother into a facility dealing with memory loss. And Ruth’s husband Bert wants her to stay at home with him in their Hyde Park apartment, a comfortable, familiar place filled with memories of their life in Chicago.
Prior to the screening, guests enjoyed interacting with the director, producers and fellow film lovers:
Albert Berger, Assistant Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs, Marie Royce and Ron Yerxa
“We like to seek out scripts that are about American culture and how it functions and the dysfunction in American culture,” explained the producers. “This is probably our most heartfelt film in that there’s not irony or satire; and although there’s comedy in it, it’s not a comedic interpretation of life and culture in the US, but that is our kind of specialty – the texture of American life.”
“I saw so much from my care giving experience in your film,” said Jay Newton-Small, creator of Memory Well. “My father used to be propose to me in public because he thought I was my mother which was so sweet because they clearly had an amazing marriage and they really loved each other. It was also awful because I’d have to turn him down and he would get very upset. One of the things I really loved about this movie was the humor in it. I think so many times in Alzheimer’s care giving – because it’s so overwhelming – is you can only just laugh because it’s so crazy, right? I wanted to ask you about why is it we don’t see more about this epidemic, because this is such a huge epidemic and it touches so many people, in Hollywood? There are so few movies about this and it’s striking to me that this is one of the very few.”
Jay Newton-Small
“When I first started to talk about this script that I was working on and writing and had written, I did get some kind of eye rolls, like: ‘Oh, an Alzheimer’s movie. You’re making an Alzheimer’s movie. Haven’t we seen that? Didn’t we see Still Alice? Didn’t we see The Notebook?’ I just think that every person that has this disease is an infinite number of things beyond the disease and every family that’s coping with this is an infinite number of things that are beyond coping with this. To me, it just doesn’t make any sense to say: ‘Well, I’ve seen one Alzheimer’s movie, I’ve seen them all,’ especially when so many people, almost every American family, is touched by this and beyond, touched by this illness or memory loss in some other presentation in one way or another.” explained Chomko. “So, I don’t know. I wanted to make Ruth more than just memory loss and more than Alzheimer’s and make her the woman that she was on the day that she got diagnosed and beyond.”
Elizabeth Chomko
Sobering statistics: “More than 5.7 million people are living with Alzheimer’s right now in the United States and the number is expected to triple by the year 2050, so it is really an epidemic. One in five Americans is already touched by this disease and that number will increase five fold in the coming years, so it is very sobering. There’s Women Against Alzheimer’s that collects these amazing statistics about how this disease disproportionately affects women and two thirds of caregivers for Alzheimer’s are actually women. I was struck, though, that in your story, the caregivers are actually men – the father and the son. Its usually the oldest daughter – that’s the most typical in American culture. So I wanted to know: Why did you choose to make the primary caregivers in this case men?” Jay Newton-Small.
“I wrote this very much inspired by my grandparents and what I observed in them and their really beautiful love story that I had grown up admiring. It was just heartbreaking to me that this would be the end of it for them, that this would be the end of that story. Watching my grandfather really transform into this man who was willing to go to any length to keep her there was very moving for me,” responded Chomko, “and to step into things that he didn’t ever really do as a husband or as a father. To step into these things for her, I just thought that was really overwhelming, honestly, and wondering why it was he was willing to do it now and what part of his own mortality he learned from it. So, I don’t know why I wrote [it that way]. It just kind of developed that way, but it wasn’t intentional.”
The panel
“Just to dig a little deeper there, 40 percent of Alzheimer’s and Dementia caregivers actually pass away before their loved ones, before the ones they’re caring for, because caring for them is so difficult,” added Jay. “They shadow each other, they follow you around constantly and that’s what happened in my case. My mother died 10 years after caring for my father, and then I became his primary caregiver for the last 5 years of his life. Did your grandfather actually pass before your grandmother? That moment to me was so…that was the moment I started crying when I was watching it was when Hilary Swank crawls into the bed and Ruth says – in this moment of total clarity, which you get sometimes with them: ‘Now is the perfect time.’ Is that sort of what you imagine really happened?”
“Yes, I think, yes he did die, not as suddenly as this, but he did quite relatively suddenly pass away right at the time when it was becoming very clear that it wasn’t a good idea for her to stay anymore and for him to take care of her any longer,” added Elizabeth. “I think it’s the stress too; but it was also, you know, that notion that I was trying to make sense of it, right, because it all felt very tragic. He died at 80 and she was 75 when he passed away and they just had so much life left. I wasn’t ready to lose them. In trying to make sense of it, I thought of that phenomenon of when you hear about these older couples who’ve been married 60 years and one dies and then two months later the other one passes with no real health problems. It’s really that notion of dying of a broken heart, and that’s how I made sense of what happened to him. She was leaving him, and he died of a broken heart.”
Q: “Just to get the producers’ perspectives here – is it different working with a female director, an experience in this era of Me Too.”
A: “I think we approached it like any director in the sense that I don’t even remember thinking of the distinction really. We had a great relationship and Elizabeth was very receptive to critical comments and ideas, whether they turned out to be good or not. Really, until you asked that question, I didn’t think about it that way. I think we were very aware of the disparity between women directors and men directors. We just did four in a row and the last one we did was a female directing team, and the second one right before was Elizabeth. I think we’re very conscientious these days of wanting to work with women as directors, and also the question of who should tell a particular story is very much in our minds these days.”
“What They Had” is now in theaters:
